STC Usability SIG Newsletter
Usability Interface

Ginny Redish Speaks at STC-TransAlpine Meeting

By Suzana Rakovic

The STC TransAlpine Chapter (TAC) held its eighth chapter meeting in Maribor, Slovenia, on October 16-19, 2002, at the HERMES SoftLab. TAC covers five European countries: Austria, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and Switzerland. TAC members live in distant cities, so 95% of chapter communication is done by phone and e-mail. To allow chapter members to meet, we organize chapter meetings as two-day small conferences twice a year. We usually choose a main topic for the conference. This time the topic was usability, and we invited Ginny Redish to be a presenter.

TAC Past-President Suzana Rakovic, Ginny Redish and VP Brian Martin

Distinguished Speaker

For the first time, we organized a one-day pre-meeting workshop. On October 16, Ginny Redish taught Assuring the Usability of Your Web Site. Twenty-two participants attended the workshop, including TAC members and people from industry and the local university. Some of them decided to attend the workshop having read an interview with Ginny that was published in a Slovenian daily newspaper.

Ginny taught practical techniques for building usable web sites. Many web sites are difficult to use, and users abandon them because they cannot find what they are looking for. That is because the site developers don’t focus enough on usability.

What We Learned

We learned four usability techniques: planning, card sorting, heuristic analysis, and usability testing. Ginny kept us involved in exercises and provoked us to debate and comment on examples from the exercises. We worked in pairs to create a site to sell Slovenian wine, and worked through scenarios with the Slovenian e-government site.

Ginny gave us practical guidelines that made the information applicable in real situations, and demonstrated ways to do our jobs better. Because Ginny had a great way of keeping our attention, the lessons were impressed on my memory so well that I have already prepared and conducted my first heuristic evaluation and usability testing of a web-based user interface. I believe that attending her workshop will make us all more successful on our future web projects.

About Our Conference

Forty people from seven countries attended the following two days of the conference, on October 17-18. Michael Fritz, Executive Director of tekom, the German technical communication society, joined the TAC members. In addition, there were members from other STC chapters, and several people from industry and the local university who were interested in technical communication and in what the TransAlpine chapter does.

The conference covered many aspects of technical communication and reflected the versatility of the trade; there was something for everybody. TAC vice-president Brian Martin gave the chapter update. Vici Koster-Lenhardt started the conference with a presentation on How to Conduct a Project Wrap-Up that Adds Value. Regina Schwarz presented her personal story of becoming a freelance consultant. Paula Berger answered the question What Does Content Management Mean for Technical Communicators? Suzana Rakovic rounded out the first day with a talk about New Career Possibilities for Technical Communicators.

On the second day Ginny Redish taught Focusing on Content: Information Design for the Web. We looked at lots of web pages, both bad and good, and practiced revising writing so that it works well on the web. Jim Palik complemented her session by showing us how to do Quick and Easy Professional Quality Portraits for the Web.

A Taste of Slovenian Specialties

Besides having the opportunity to listen to technical communication experts on diverse topics, we enjoyed exchanging our experiences and making new friends during delicious lunches by the Slovenian Chef Mr. Strukelj, who prepared a variety of Slovenian specialties. The most important reason for coming to TAC meetings is networking. We had lots of wonderful opportunities to speak directly with the speakers and to chat among the attendees during breaks, lunches, a walking tour of Maribor, two dinners, and Saturday’s excursion to the Styria country.

Special Thanks to Sponsors and Organizers

Organizing these meetings takes a lot of time, effort, and money; and TAC is grateful to have sponsors.

• HERMES SoftLab for hosting our event
• IZUM - co-organizer of the meeting
• MCA d.o.o. for providing the audio-visual equipment and printed brochures
• Kaleidoscope for treating us to the closing champagne reception
• Alanti for treating us to one of the coffee breaks

More Information about the TransAlpine Chapter

You can read about attendees’ impressions in the last TransAlpiner, TAC online newsletter, at www.stc-transalpine.org. In these articles, you’ll find some of the reasons to join us at our next TAC meeting on March 26-28, 2003, in Trento, Italy. Joe Welinske, president of WinWriters, will be speaking about Web-based User Assistance. Come visit us in Trento.